Cambodia's Cottage Industry Economy

You don't have to travel far from Phnom Penh to find Cambodia's cottage industry economy. Perhaps the best example is Koh Dach Island, in the middle of the Mekong River, just upstream from the capital city. Koh Dach is also known as Silk Island for reasons that become obvious once you wander a kilometer up the dusty road from the ferry landing.

Most of Koh Dach's 30 square kilometers are fields of corn, soy beans and sesame stretching in both directions from the road to the shores of the island, along with groves of banana and mango trees. Nearly all the residences are right on the road, houses up to 10 feet above the ground on stilts to keep them dry when the Mekong floods in the wet season.

At the loom

In the space between the stilts you see why Koh Dach is known as Silk Island. Chances are, though, that you will have already encountered young girls on the road competing with each other to offer you the finest, most inexpensive silk scarves in the world, which just happen to be draped over their arms.

Silk weaver, Koh Dach

These girls are selling scarves, table cloths, runners and wall art woven by their mothers and sisters on hand looms set up in the shade under their houses. The weavers don't seem to mind visitors wandering into their work areas and photographing them as they select new threads and throw the shuttle to weave colorful patterns from simple geometrics to complex scenery.

A few of the weavers set aside space to display and sell their products, but most seem to send their daughters out on the dusty road to try to corner the few tourists who ride the ferry from Phnom Penh to visit the island. Most of their beautiful silks end up in the markets in Phnom Penh, where the price is noticeably higher than on the road through Koh Dach.

Carving Buddha

As you travel farther from Phnom Penh, on the roads to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat to the north and to Battambang to the south, you see that such cottage industries are the norm throughout Cambodia.

Some villages specialize, like one on the road to Siem Reap where every man seemed to be a stone carver, working on statues of the Buddha: Buddha meditating, blessing, reposing, always smiling. In another village a small blacksmith's shop kept half a dozen men busy shaping steel into machetes.

Many of the home-based businesses are food related. Under one small canopy near Battambang two women were making sticky rice by mixing
rice with beans and coconut milk, sealing it in bamboo cylinders, then roasting it slowly over hot coals. 

Making sticky rice

In another nearby village, several homes were engaged in making rice paper to wrap spring rolls. A young man milled rice flour, which was then boiled with water, salt and tapioca flour. One woman dipped a tool that looked like a rolling pin into the mixture and pulled it out with a thin film coating it, then unrolled it over a bamboo lattice to cool and dry. 

Drying rice paper

Drying bananas

Across the road from one of the rice paper shops was a home where the residents were busy drying bananas. The bananas were sliced very thin lengthwise,then laid on a bamboo frame (bamboo has more uses in Southeast Asia than duct tape has in America) to dry in the sun. Ripening bananas hung on a tree overlooking the drying frame. The dried banana strips had the chewy texture of a Fruit Roll-up and tasted exactly like a banana.

There are larger industries in Cambodia's villages as well. One day, heavy traffic and a street demonstration forced us to detour on our way to the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek. As we made our way down the narrow winding streets of a small village, we spotted a fairly large building with a tin roof and steam drifting from its open sides. We asked to stop and see what it was. We found the owner, who was more than happy to let us wander through his salt refinery. 

Cleaning fish

Skimming salt

We first saw a woman cooking rice and cleaning fish for the workers inside. A young boy was spreading sea salt to dry in the sun. Some workers were stoking rice husk fires below large vats full of boiling salt water. The owner explained that the dried sea salt was then simmered in water and iodine to make iodized salt. More workers skimmed salt from the simmering vats and shoveled it into woven baskets. Meanwhile, the cooled ashes of the rice husks were loaded onto a truck to return to the fields to help fertilize the next crop of rice. 

Nothing is wasted.

In another village outside Battambang we visited what was probably our least anticipated scheduled stop -- a prahok factory. 

Drying fish at the prahok factory

Prahok is fermented fish paste used as a condiment in many Khmer recipes. Mixed with other ingredients, it's quite tolerable, but the processing of raw fish can be pretty unappetizing. Ralph had advised us to bring cheap flip flops that we could throw away after our visit, because the factory floor would be covered with fish waste. I had paid a dollar at the Battambang market for a pair of yellow flip flops for just that purpose.

Sorting fish

Outside the factory were bamboo racks covered with orange fish fillets drying in the sun. Inside, we found women cleaning and crushing piles of small fish with wooden mallets, but the floor around them was quite clean. I wouldn't want to eat off of it, but my new flip flops were fine after a quick rinse and drying in the sun. I still have them, and they fit better than any flip flops I've ever worn.

The growth of tourism in Cambodia has had its impact well beyond the night life of Phnom Penh and the ancient temples of Angkor Wat. 

Take the "floating village” of Kompong Phluk. This village is one of the many that ring the Tonle Sap, the Great Lake that is in many ways the heart of Cambodia. It would not be correct to say that the villages are on the shores of the Tonle Sap. During the rainy season, the villages are out in the lake. In the dry season, they are much closer to the edge.

Town Hall at Kompong Phluk

The Tonle Sap is about eight meters deeper in the wet season because the heavy flooding of the Mekong slows the tributary Tonle Sap River and backs its waters upstream. Of course, the greater depth in such relatively flat country means dramatically greater breadth as well, more than doubling the surface area. It makes no sense to build fishing villages miles from the shore, which is where they would be in the dry season. 

So homes in the villages of the Tonle Sap are built on stilts high enough to keep the floors above water in the wet season. In the dry season, a misstep from the entrance to one of these homes could be suicidal. 

At some point, enterprising people realized that these villages might be interesting to tourists. Kompong Phluk, being the nearest village to Siem Reap and the hordes of  visitors to Angkor Wat, became the most popular. 

Hot rodding in Kompong Phluk

We were there in the dry season, in December. The rains had stopped a month or so earlier, so the  lake was falling. We still had to ride in a noisy long-tail boat for about 30 minutes to reach the village, which was a sort of Southeast Asian version of Venice. With water for streets, boats are the only practical vehicles for getting around, so everyone gets around in boats. Even small children with no adult supervision poled, rowed, paddled and even motored through their village in boats. I saw only one group of three children wearing life jackets. 

The influx of tourists has led to the opening of a nice restaurant, a boardwalk through the flooded

Paddling through the flooded forest

forest and new jobs for women paddling tourists in canoes through that same forest, often with sleeping infants in their laps. Enterprising people with boats paddle out to the tourist boats to sell snacks and soda.

But life goes on normally for most of the village, so fishermen still fish, net menders repair nets, mechanics repair boat engines. On the ride back to dry land, we saw rice farmers working in paddies they had created by trapping the falling water, the silt at the bottom providing extremely fertile soil for Cambodia's staple crop.

Driving the bamboo train

One other quaint enterprise that has gained additional traction from tourism is the bamboo train. At one time, there was a network of narrow gage (one meter) rail around the country, but today there is just one stretch that runs from just south of Battambang to an old brick factory about 15 kilometers away.

Bamboo trains are flat bed cars sitting on two axles with steel wheels salvaged from old tanks. Passengers and cargo ride on the bamboo slatted bed at speeds up to 50 km/h. A motorcycle or small tractor engine provides power via belt drive directly to the rear axle.

Since there is just one track and the autonomous trains travel in both directions, there is a protocol to handle trains when they meet in the jungle.

Fishing beside the bamboo train

The drivers simply disassemble the train with the lighter load and move the parts off the track to let the heavier train pass. The lighter train is then reassembled and continues on its way. The railway passes through jungle and wetlands, and provides opportunities to stop and watch fishermen cast their nets into the muddy river.

Most of the narrow rail network was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. My next blog entry will deal with that terrible period in Cambodia's history.